Josef Mengele collection

Josef Mengele (1911-1979) was born on March 16, 1911 in Günzburg. He studied medicine and anthropology in Munich and Bonn. Mengele was deployed as camp physician (Lagerarzt) in Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp from May 1943 onwards. He was tasked with the selections and conducted medical experiments on prisoners. He left Auschwitz in January 1945 just before the Red Army liberated the camp. After several months on the run, he decided to escape to South America in 1948. He fled using one of the so-called rat lines (Rattenlinien) via Italy to Argentina. In 1960, he settled permanently in Brazil. In 1979, he suffered a stroke while swimming in the resort Bertioga and died. Mengele was buried under the name "Wolfgang Gerhard". His death did not become publicly known before 1985. The collection comprises personal written documents of Josef Mengele. They were given to his friends Wolfgang and Liselotte Bossert after his death in 1979. In 1985, the Bossert couple sold Mengele's bequest to the magazine "Der Stern". Jointly with documents given to the magazine "Die Bunte" the records were provided to the prosecution Frankfurt (Main) for their investigations. The historian Ulrich Völklein sifted the prosecution's collected material during the research for a publication. In 1999, the Steidl-Verlag published his non-fiction book "Josef Mengele — Der Arzt von Auschwitz". Subsequently, Völklein handed his collected materials over to the Fritz Bauer Institute.